Changed My Mind
by Sarah1281
Summary: Loki decides to take Thor's final offer to just forget the whole evil thing and come home after all and works with them to end the battle that much quicker. That works for the Asgardians but the Avengers, particularly Clint, are not too pleased about this. Helping stop his own invasion or not, he did kind of try to conquer the world.


Changed My Mind

Loki might have known that Thor would make things difficult.

The secret was out that he wasn't Thor's brother and never was and at any rate he had rather burnt his bridges when he conspired – albeit falsely – with Asgard's enemies to murder the Allfather. Trying to kill Thor couldn't have helped matters either. And apparently, if the fact he'd been thrown into an abyss by his so-called 'family' was any indication, wiping out Asgard's ancient enemy was also a problem. Really, Loki was starting to understand why Jotunheim was still a threat after all this time.

Thor, predictably, refused to face reality and kept begging him to just come home. Loki rather wondered if the Allfather and the rest of Asgard would be so forgiving. Then again, if Golden _Thor _asked them to they might just agree to pretend that nothing happened just as Thor seemed to want to.

Thor's presumption (he couldn't just _decide _something like that!) was annoying but Loki didn't think he'd be less annoyed if Thor acted like they were strangers either. Really, there was no scenario in which Thor was going to be involved where Loki would not be annoyed, it seemed.

And it was one thing for Thor to try to persuade him in a quieter moment but the middle of his Chitauri invasion really did not seem like the best time. Thor had always been so self-centered.

Still, Thor was almost _begging _him to help and that was such an unusual and welcome sight that Loki found himself (to his chagrin) seriously considering the matter.

It wasn't that he had ever actually thought that giving a fine piece of powerful Asgardian technology to his…associates was a good idea and he couldn't say that he cared for their presumption in threatening him. Hadn't that been why he had created a way to destroy the portal with his staff?

And so, while Loki's first impulse after Thor requested his help was to just stab him and carry on with his invasion, he stayed his hand. Taking Midgard had only ever been a poor substitute for his lost life on Asgard and so no great loss.

"Very well," he had said.

Thor had been surprised at his easy acquiescence (though not as properly shocked as Loki felt that he ought to be) and the look on his face made it clear that he was reading far too much into this alliance.

The battle did not last long at that point (though long enough evidently for the idiot Midgardians to attempt to completely annihilate the battleground) but Loki still rather felt that it was glorious.

And then there was the aftermath.

Barton had looked ready to shoot him on the spot but Stark had intervened before Thor could and demanded shawarma. When Stark wanted something, he had a very Thor-like tendency to whine until he got his way and so off they went.

The shawarma restaurant did not actually appear to be open but Stark appeared not to notice and shortly afterwards they were all being fed.

"Can we talk about this now?" Barton demanded, annoyed, sending his third glare at Loki in the last five minutes.

"Talk about what?" Thor asked innocently. Could he really be that clueless?

"Why is _he _here?" Barton demanded, stabbing a finger Loki's way.

"He was invited, as we all were, to this most delicious shawarma restaurant," Thor replied, eyeing Barton strangely.

"All of this is his fault!" Barton complained.

Thor frowned reprovingly at him. "That's not very kind, Clint."

"That's because your brother isn't very nice," Barton said, gesturing emphatically.

"Take care how you speak; I do not slights against my family well," Thor warned.

"But he's the one who…" Barton broke off, throwing his hands up in the air. "Back me up here, Tasha."

"Everything that Clint is saying is true, Thor," Romanov deigned to point out.

Barton nodded. "Yes, exactly."

"It is," Thor agreed reluctantly.

"So why is he celebrating our victory over his forces with us instead of rotting in a cell like he deserves?" Barton demanded.

It was at this point that Loki felt he should say something. "As if your human prisons could hold me."

"Our airship prison was doing wonderfully until your forces attacked it," Barton countered.

"Yes, well done with that," Loki complimented.

Clint's ever-present glare just intensified.

"Your aircraft carrier is gone and, as you said, I had no trouble escaping from it."

"You no longer have minions to free you," Barton snapped.

Loki raised an eyebrow. "Are you so certain of that?"

Thor cut in again. "As an Asgardian citizen, Loki will be dealt with by Asgard."

Stark glanced over. "Yeah, you know, you say 'deal with' instead of 'imprison' or even 'punish'."

"That's understood, though," Rogers said confidently.

Thor said nothing.

"Maybe not so understood then," Banner said dryly.

Loki wasn't surprised. He had been offered the chance to forget all about that Tesseract mess not the chance to be treated as a criminal.

"He will be judged on his actions, both his role in starting this conflict and his key role in ending it, and we will respond appropriately," Thor said delicately.

"That's strangely not helping me at all," Barton complained. "What's this about his role in starting this but his _key _role in ending it?"

"It seems to me that Loki played more of a role in ending this crisis than in starting it," Thor said.

Barton slammed his hands down on the table. "You can't be serious. No matter what he did to stop it – and I'm willing to concede he did switch sides when it became clear that we were winning-"

"A little before that," Loki interrupted, highly insulted. "My switching sides was _when _you started winning."

"We would have won regardless," Stark said.

"None of that matters," Barton said, rolling his eyes. "What's important is that Loki was not the only one fighting to stop the Chitauri but we wouldn't have even had a Chitauri invasion or even lost the Tesseract without him!"

Barton did make a decent point. Loki could have countered it evenly but he decided to leave the matter to Thor, to see how he would justify his words. At heart, Loki knew they came from the fact Thor simply did not want this whole situation to go on any more than he did but surely he'd have some other way of phrasing it. Thor wasn't _that _much of a mindless oaf and they'd spent more than a millennium in each other's company.

"As far as I can see, though of course I have yet to hear the full story, none of this was Loki's idea. Not," he quickly added, holding up a hand to forestall Barton's inevitable protest, "that that in any way absolves Loki of responsibility for what he did but I believe that if my brother were not involved then the Tesseract would still have been stolen to open the portal and people still would have died. More, most likely, because someone else may not have seen reason and stopped the invasion as Loki did."

"The death count for his half a week of mayhem is still rather high," Romanov pointed out. "You can't say that just because it would have happened anyway without Loki means we should just ignore the fact that it _was _Loki."

"I quite agree with that, Natasha," Thor said. "But the fact that he was replaceable is why I hold that he played a role in the invasion and a key role in stopping it."

"Even so," Barton argued, "stopping his actions after they've already done some damage but before they can do as much damage as they could shouldn't just give him a free pass."

"We won't give him a free pass," Thor claimed.

"So you're planning on executing him?" Barton asked.

Thor looked appalled. "He helped stop the invasion! And he is my brother. On Asgard, we do not execute people lightly."

"He tried to conquer the world," Barton pointed out.

"One world and he quickly changed his mind. It is not nothing, certainly, but we have never resorted to execution over something of that scale," Thor said.

"Being imprisoned forever, then," Barton suggested.

Thor shook his head. "I have heard that that Is a sentence that is sometimes imposed about your people. I find it alarming even if it usually lasts less than fifty years. With someone as long-lived as we…do you really think that Loki's actions justify ten thousand years of imprisonment? Twenty? One hundred?"

Barton looked torn. "Well…"

"Can you even conceive of such a time? I know that, for myself, I cannot and I have seen many centuries more than you," Thor concluded gravely.

"Fine. How does an imprisonment of a lengthy time sound?" Barton asked. "Maybe a hundred years. Surely _that's _reasonable. That's what someone might get if they were human, even if they wouldn't live to see the end of their sentence."

"We will certainly take such an idea into consideration," Thor said, far more diplomatically than Loki had thought him capable of.

Barton just looked pained. "I know that we really aren't going to be able to stop you from just taking him back to Asgard with you but…_please _tell me that you are going to give him some sort of punishment!"

"I can guarantee that Loki will feel like he is being punished," Thor vowed.

Barton rolled his eyes. "I'm willing to bet that Loki feels like he's being punished sitting here right now with us and eating shawarma."

"I don't like it," Loki declared, gesturing towards his plate. Barton wasn't entirely wrong.

"Of course you don't," Barton said disgustedly.

Thor said nothing.

"Oh, somebody back me up here!"

"It really does set a bad example to just let someone get away with these things," Rogers pointed out.

"No one decides to go out and conquer a planet and kill a lot of people depending on what will happen to them if they are stopped," Thor argued. "And they don't plan on being stopped. I know you want Loki punished more severely than I would like him punished but you have to concede that it will be difficult getting Loki to agree to a reasonable standard of behavior and a harsh punishment would just decrease the likelihood of it happening anytime this century."

"So what?" Barton asked sarcastically. "You just pretend this never happened because if you try to make him take some goddamn responsibility then Loki will be difficult?"

Thor raised an eyebrow at him. "Do you really doubt that he would?"

Barton deflated. "No."

"He could be a powerful force of good," Thor said persuasively. "He has been before."

"Lots of people do lots of good things before they go evil," Barton countered. "It's why they call it 'going evil' and not 'always was evil.'"

"I don't see why you wish to convince me," Thor said. "There have always been precedents for certain people who are useful or well-connected not to be treated the same as those who are not."

Loki looked pointedly at Romanov.

Barton scowled. "None of us have done anything _near _the same level!"

"You lacked the power to," Loki said smugly.

Barton kicked him under the table.

"It will not ultimately be my decision but my father's," Thor said.

"You should have no fear then, on that score," Loki told Barton. "That man wanted Thor to throw me into an abyss."

Everyone turned to stare at Thor.

"That never happened!" Thor protested haplessly. "We were fighting and almost fell off an abyss and our father caught us and Loki…fell."

"He means he threw me and the Allfather didn't disapprove," Loki translated.

"I do not! And that is not what happened!" Thor exclaimed. "You know very well what happened or at least you _should_."

"Hm," Stark said, peering closely at them. "Am I detecting hints of 'you're not my real father' here? Please tell me that this isn't all some terribly overdramatic reaction to finding out you were adopted."

"I think the word is kidnapped," Loki corrected.

"I think the word is _rescued_," Thor disagreed. "You know that Father would never be overly cruel. I nearly started a war and I was banished but it only lasted until I proved myself worthy."

"Three days on Midgard counts more as sightseeing than banishment," Loki said.

"You were the one who sent the destroyer and told me that everything had gone to Hel since my banishment," Thor pointed out. "Without that, I might have been there for years."

"Yes, with that girl. I'm sure you would have been miserable indeed," Loki said dryly.

"Wait, I can't tell," Stark said, leaning in closer to Banner. "Is he being sarcastic about that or insulting Thor's girlfriend?"

"Probably both," Banner said.

Barton cleared his throat pointedly.

Thor guiltily glanced his way. "Not that that means that he wouldn't be properly punished!"

"You should give it up," Romanov advised. "He's too personally invested in this. You know you wouldn't be able to change his mind if Loki had wiped out our entire species."

"I most certainly would be more open to the idea of a long-term imprisonment if he had wiped out all or even a significant portion of the population," Thor defended himself.

"You realize that you just admitted you're not really open to the idea of a long-term imprisonment, right?" Barton asked rhetorically.

Thor shrugged. "I also admitted that it will not be my decision."

"Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if they just threw me in a dungeon and forgot all about me," Loki confided.

"We won't just forget about you!" Thor objected.

Loki tilted his head. "No, I suppose not. Far better to use me as a story of folly and an example of what not to do."

Thor hesitated. "Well, brother, as far as using you to illustrate what _not _to do goes…"

"Why did you even switch sides anyway?" Rogers asked suddenly. "You say it was not because the battle was turning against you and since you told us how to stop the invasion while countless Chitauri were still swarming in I believe you. You don't seem like you really want to be with your brother right now."

"Oh, that's how he always is," Thor said dismissively.

"And suddenly Loki turning evil makes a lot more sense," Banner commented.

Stark nodded.

"He says that and – while I would not presume to speak for him – if he didn't want to be here he wouldn't be," Thor said simply.

Loki shrugged. "The shawarma is really not _that _bad."

Stark raised his glass in triumph.

"Perhaps it is only that he likes to complain about me," Thor said magnanimously but it was clear to Loki that he didn't think that was it. Loki could concede that he was not entirely wrong as long as he did not have to do so aloud.

"Loki?" Rogers prompted.

Ah, right, he had asked a question.

"I rather enjoyed seeing Thor begging me to save him once more," Loki said idly. "And I thought 'if I keep turning him down maybe he will keep doing it in the short-term but eventually he will give up.' It's called positive reinforcement."

"This doesn't…bother you?" Barton asked, looking at Thor uncertainly.

"If it's what it takes to see Loki return to Asgard then I will do it gladly."

"The fact that this doesn't bother him should really take the fun out of it," Loki mused. "But somehow it doesn't."

"I'm starting to think that all Asgardians are just crazy," Barton complained.

"With your sample size of _two_," Stark scoffed. "Yeah, that makes sense."

"Let's just stop talking about this," Barton requested. "It's making me want to shoot Loki with an exploding arrow again and I doubt Thor will approve. I'm just going to pretend that when Loki gets back to Asgard he's going to be tied down by the entrails of his kid-"

"My brother doesn't have children," Thor interrupted.

Barton ignored that. "And have poison dripping slowly on his face from now until the end of time."

Everyone stared at him in horror.

"What?" Barton snapped. "I didn't come up with it!"

"Doesn't doing that ultimately lead to Loki deciding to end the universe and succeeding at it?" Banner asked.

"Yeah, I really don't think that's the best plan if we're hoping to save the universe," Stark, predictably, backed Banner up. "What kind of superhero are you anyway?"

Barton moved from glaring daggers at Loki to glaring daggers at everyone there except Romanov and refused to say another word the rest of the meal.


End file.
